We left home May 31st and returned June 16th. On this driving trip we stopped in Quebec City (B), Sainte-Anne-des-Monts (C), Gaspé (D), Percé (E), Carleton-sur-Mer (F), Rivière-du-Loup (G) and then home.
As we prepared for travel once again, our little village of Thornhill — located just north of Toronto in that space between city and country — is well on the path of opening up after the long period of lockdown due to the global pandemic. Subway parking lots are fuller, there’s more traffic on the streets, fewer masks are worn; optimism abounds. My passage from quarantine has been slow, inhibited by the reluctance to take that final step into the open air, out from our protective cocoon woven around us by the threads of fear and social responsibility. But now it’s time to dare to travel. A journey not just of roads, but of an emotional transformation from the secure into the uncertain.
Our car, acting both as my shell and my tool of restoration, will enable navigation along a gradual path towards metamorphosis. Packed with the necessities and some frivolities for good measure, it is all set for the long journey from home to the Gaspé Peninsula through Québec City and along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River.
The route, ordered by an immoveable ribbon of asphalt and concrete, is disrupted by the twists and turns that comes with an emotional transformation. This drive is an embodiment of in-betweenness, uncertainty, a state of transience and the temporary, a bridge connecting the lockdown and the world that’s evolving beyond it.
Yet, it is this risk that comes with travel, this flux, this ambiguity, that stirs a profound excitement. It is the essence of transformation that it provokes a tension, a thrilling dance between predictability and uncertainty – a debate that drives the wheels of life.
Québec City was our first tentative step outside our protective layer of home and routine; a gentle dip into the shallow end, the depth mitigated as we have been there many times before. The timeless charm of its old world architecture, the city, also emerging from the pandemic, stands as a testament to endurance, to the will of people to adapt and persist. It is an embodiment of a new normal, a place solidly rooted in the stability of a past, injected with a hope in what might come in an uncertain future.
The drive continued along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, a legacy of the last ice age, contained within its boundaries, flowing unceasingly, yet Its waters are ever changing, never the same ones as before. The constancy of its existence, juxtaposed against its eternal flux, echoes the dichotomy of this journey. The physical act of doing and the emotional confidence to act.
As our destination is finally reached, emergence from our car marks the end of a transition, but I realize that it’s another beginning.
Blog Posts
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Trip Planing using ChatGPT
We recently returned from a seventeen-day driving tour of the Gaspé Peninsula. It’s the first time we have been there. In preparation for the trip I used ChatGPT to identify sites to visit, and hotels to stay. I asked it the following questions: As I have noted in other posts on the use of AI…
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Québec
Within the embrace of our first stop, Old Quebec, a vestige of antiquity endures—an architectural testament to the fortitude of a bygone era. The ramparts, steadfast and resolute, stand as sentinels of a time when defences were paramount. They remain as the sole example of fortified city walls in the Americas north of Mexico, a…
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Sainte Anne des Monts
On the windswept southern banks of the St. Lawrence River, Sainte Anne de Monts was not only conveniently located, allowing us to measure the pace of our drive, but offered a reasonably well-rate motel with a restaurant. As simply a pit-stop on our journey to Gaspé, we needed nothing more extravagant.
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Madeleine Centre
We gave ourselves a lot of time to drive the short distance between Sainte Anne des Monts and Gaspé permitting us to stop along the way, often at lighthouses and marked site of interest. The rain we experienced on this leg of the trip foreshadowed what we experienced for much of the remaining trip.
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Gaspé
Gaspé was the fist of our two primary stops. The main attraction, for us, was Forillon National Park, and its hiking trails. Having a plan to stay seven days gave us enough time to see the sites, hike the trails and settle into the local environment. The hotel had a little dinning area, primarily for…